Time hogs

I spent Saturday making mail art. The grand total? Six cards.

You may well ask how it could take all day to make six postcards. Well, there's a lot involved. For instance, I was sending a postcard to Kirsti, a sports photographer in Norway. I knew I had at least one Olympics stamp from the 80s or 90s in the stash of stamps I've torn from envelopes. But once I started looking for it, I also felt compelled to re-file all of the ones that had drifted from one category to another, thus saving myself three hours on some future day... but not this one. For another card, I had to weigh whether my compadre would mind my cutting up one of his possum photos. Weighing takes time. So does trimming a possum out of a tree.

The other time hog is that I'm new at this craft and unsure what tool or supply works best. One creation required that beads be glued to a plastic postcard securely enough that they won't fall off in the mail. I ended up using E600 medium viscosity clear adhesive. I'm pretty sure it will hold, because even before it dried it was holding beads to eight of my fingers, the palm of my right hand, the wrong side of the postcard, and the by-passing dog. Another postcard incorporates litter from a park in Louisville, including a bit of CAUTION tape. Given the fragility of the tape and the potential for e coli contamination from Louisville's creeks (we have a combined sewer system here, as do more than 700 other American cities that are going to have to jack up taxes to correct the fetid crisis), I opted for strapping tape to hold and contain the CAUTION warning.

Time hogs are like all the rest of the hogs in the world. Whether they're good or not depends on whether you ended up with the bacon or the tail on your plate. I may be slow, and I may get distracted, and I may glue myself to the dog once in a while, but here at my house it's all bacon all the time.

I'm not going to post new cards I've made until they're headed to the post office. The most recent ones are so good you'll probaby want to sign up for the RSS feed.